[Leica] Now RAW vs JPEG

[pklein at 2alpha.net (Peter Klein)]

Tina:  I now realize that we were talking about two overlapping but 
somewhat different things.

For the record, I will shoot JPG only when I'm doing routine snaps under 
easy conditions where the audience is family or friends and I don't want to 
spend lots of time on each image.  The E-1 helps in this case, because it 
produces really nice JPGs out of the camera without much tweaking.

The rest of the time, I shoot RAW.  I think of RAW the way my dentist 
thinks of flossing.  He says you should only floss the teeth you want to 
keep.  I think you can dispense with RAW only for those pictures that you 
know will be perfectly exposed and white balanced, and have a dynamic range 
that won't blow your sensor's limits.

In my earlier post, I was talking more about whether or not you were stuck 
in the camera manufacturer's RAW converter for most adjustments or 
not.  You are quite right that certain things are best done right from the 
RAW file, especially white balance.  Ditto for other camera-unique things 
that get stored in the RAW file, such as what lens you used, which keys 
information from a vignetting table, or reduces purple fringing more in the 
field than on-axis (geez, I sound like Erwin now  :-)

But when it comes to curve adjustments and sharpening and such, I prefer to 
work on the 16-bit TIFF after basic RAW processing.  I just think I have 
better control in Picture Window Pro than I do in Olympus' RAW 
converter.  So I just turn off the RAW developer's features that I want to 
handle later:  sharpening, contrast, saturation, etc. And I can do the same 
blending of highlight and shadow RAW "developments" that you 
demonstrated--I just have to save the two versions as TIFFs, then blend in 
PWP using a variation on the clone tool that is the rough equivalent of 
history brushing.

Photoshop users have the advantage of having the RAW converter included in 
their image editor.  So the boundary between RAW converter and image editor 
is blurred.  I'm still doing things a la carte with Olympus' RAW software 
as my "appetizer." Among E-1 mavens, the RAW software favorites seem to be 
Olympus Viewer or Studio, followed by Capture One, with Adobe RAW in third 
place.  The consensus is that Viewer or Studio produce better E-1 detail 
and color than Adobe Camera Raw.

If you say that your results using the RAW converter for curve-type 
adjustments are better than the 16-bit TIFF, I'll take your word for it, as 
I haven't sytematically tested it and you have.  But it's interesting: I 
have read that for color, unless your adjustments are fairly drastic, often 
8-bit suffices.  Yes, you get some toothcombing, but not anything you see 
in the final print.  I have found that to be mostly true, but not always, 
and decidedly not in available light situations. So I still prefer to stay 
16-bit until I'm at least done with curves.

So my digital workflow is white balance and "exposure compensation" in RAW, 
and maybe a bit of brightness and contrast adjustment if things are really 
pushing the envelope.  Get it roughly right, but don't sweat the small 
stuff.  Then save as a 16-bit TIFF and go to PWP, where I know the curve 
tool well, and I have subtleties in the sharpening tool that I just don't 
have in the RAW converter.

Hmm.  Maybe I should try Capture One LE, where you can easily do most 
Photoshoppish things in the RAW converter.

--Peter

>Peter wrote:
> >Tina:  As I understand it, a 16-bit TIFF file contains pretty much the
> >same information as the RAW file.
> >
> >--Peter

Tina wrote:
>No.  There is a big difference between Tiff and Raw files.  The Tiff has
>been converted and decisions have to be made when the file is converted
>from RAW.  Especially with the newest version of Photoshop, you have the
>ability to correct chromatic fringing, lens distortion, vignetting,
>temperature, exposure, sharpness, noise, and a lot more.  The Raw file
>contains every bit of possible information.  When it is converted, even to
>a 16 bit Tiff, bits of information are discarded and cannot be covered in
>the converted form.  If you try to do some of the adjustments that are
>possible on a Raw file with the Tiff file in Photoshop, you will end up
>with combed histograms and posterized and banded prints.